ATLANTA-It is not every day that the owner of a 400,000-square foot office building is able to renovate it without help from a lender. But Atlanta-based Westplan Investors, a boutique commercial real estate firm, which owns the 55 Marietta Street building in downtown Atlanta, is just such an owner. The building, which is 55 years old, just received a $5 million renovation paid for by Westplan.

The renovation of 55 Marietta Street included, in addition to cosmetic touches, such as an upgraded lobby and renovation of the 3,000 to 4,000 square feet of ground floor retail, new transformers to generate more power and more backup generators.

The main rationale for beefing up the power is that half the building is a telecom hotel with tenants like Cyberwurxz, Q West and Cogent. A big part of these companies' business is hosting websites.

In addition to the building changes mentioned above, Westplan renovated a floor to show prospective tenants what their space would look like, should they choose to rent at 55 Marietta, which is 60% occupied. Westplan does the build-out for most tenants, says Ewoud Swaak, president of Westplan Investors.

Westplan purchased the building in 1993 and half of it was converted into a telecom hotel the next year. The firm decided to do the conversion once it was discovered that 55 Marietta Street was sitting on the main fiber optic network for the US, in essence, a fiber optic super highway, says Swaak. “We didn’t know this when we bought the building,” he says.

Swaak is hoping that the renovation will help to fill up the building. Last year, there were 30,000 square feet of new tenants added, but none thus far in 2010, although there may be a 10,000-square-foot-lease signed in the second quarter, he says. With a vacancy rate in downtown Atlanta at 23.3% in first quarter 2010, according to Cushman & Wakefield of Georgia, filling up a building the size of 55 Marietta is no easy task. It will take a couple of years to increase the occupancy rate significantly, says Swaak, who adds that “at least the economy has bottomed out.”

“Not having debt on the building is really important today,” says Swaak. “In the last couple of years, tenants have worried about landlords being able to pay for tenant improvements and brokerage fees,” he says.

The downtown office market is made up primarily of older buildings, says Chris Shaner, research director at Cushman & Wakefield of Georgia. One of the problems for downtown landlords, he says, ”is that newer office buildings in Buckhead are attracting tenants, which is the reason you see more renovations going on today with older office product. To compete, requires an upgrade.”

In addition to owning the office building on Marietta Street, Westplan Investors manages a portfolio of 7,000 apartments in Florida, Texas, Arizona, South Carolina and Georgia and roughly 350,000 square feet of shopping centers in Georgia.